New Parallella Product Offerings

When we launched the “$99 Parallella project” on Kickstarter in 2012, the goal was to “democratize access to supercomputing”. With a $99 price point, we knew that we would not make a profit, but we figured the value of reaching the whole world with our technology was enough of a reward for Adapteva as a company. With over 8,500 boards shipped to 75 countries (and over 150 Universities), we are certainly off to a great start!

Despite the enormous interest, it’s going take years until our Epiphany chip business can stand on its own. This is just the reality of the semiconductor design-in cycle. This means that despite the generous investment from Ericsson and Carmel Ventures, we can no longer afford to subsidize the cost of the Parallella boards and will have to raise the price slightly so that everyone involved can stay motivated (including Adapteva, our US manufacture, and our distributors). As we the sales ramp up, we will work hard to reduce prices and bring to market Parallella versions at $99 and below!

The great news is that these new products will all ship with a larger heatsink and an improved power supply included so the ramp-up process is MUCH simpler. This new bundling is in response to loud and clear feedback from our Kickstater backers. “Get rid of the fan!”

The “Desktop” Parallella version is currently in stock at shop.adapteva.com and should ship via Amazon within 24-48 hours. (US customers only, international distribution starting soon). The “Microserver” and “Embedded” Parallella boards will be available in stock within a few weeks.

Still not convinced that the Parallella is something special? Check out some of the open source projects below.

Look forward to hearing from all of you and seeing the projects you create!

Sincerely,
Andreas Olofsson
Founder/CEO at Adapteva
@adapteva

Community Examples:

Check out some of the demo videos/examples from early users below! Slowly but surely, the evidence is accumulating that the Parallella platform delivers!

43 Comments

You crew are amazing, genuinely awesome people. Thank you for listening to the community and coming up with a solution that no longer requires a fan and the Microserver edition. I’m sure most of us will understand that it’s not always feasible to sell at a particular price point and won’t begrudge Adapteva doing what it can to stay afloat while trying to revolutionise computing like you are.

The same heatsink cannot be used with Kickstarter boards due to the higher profile capacitors adjacent to the Zynq and Epiphany chips. However, a similar heatsink could be used if machined to accommodate those taller parts.

Hi, I think there a lot of us who are very keen to see the 64 core board become a reality. Perhaps another kickstarter campaign to get the project up and running again. 64 cores for a few hundred dollars would truly be the revolution many of us have hoped for from Adapteva.

Even when I would kill to get one of the 64 core boards, probably would be very useless. I think there is no Linux distribution so tuned that could route all its duties through all those cores. We the standard users could more effectively take advantage of the 16 cores rather than the 64. Probably only the Enterprise markets could leverage all its power. But they won’t knock Adapteva’s door. Sadly 🙁

BTW. This commenting system sucks so much. It deleted my comment twice before clicking the post button.

The architecture doesn’t work like that. If I got it correctly, you have two ARM cores. These are the “standard” cores that Linux runs on. Then there’s a separated Epiphany co-processor (16 or 64 cores) that is left for *you* to program using the SDK. Linux doesn’t run on the Epiphany cores, nor it routes data; you have to do that. Having 64 cores doesn’t change anything for Linux.

I’m not going to shout. I expect you can hear me over there in your comfortable U/S enclave.
But was there not an understanding that you might supply the low-cost boards to supporters outside of the USA as well?

Didn’t quite get to the explicit “Hallo, world, and F*%# You if you are not One of Us” – but that’s what we can hear when we read your actions.

I might say, we see that as a typically self-centred American attitude; it comes with a long history of offering cooperation on important projects, but not coming up with the goods when it comes to sharing results.

Altogether what we, over the pond here in England, call a “poor show”. We’re used to it from you people. Shame on me, I suppose.

Hi Bill, I understand that you are frustrated at not having been able to secure hardware thus far, but if you could please keep it civil and consider that setting up global distribution may not be as simple as you imagine. The intention is, and always has been, to make Parallella available to all and at as low a cost as possible and is sustainable. Thousands of boards have previously been shipped to Europe and plenty more will be available soon. If you could just be a little more patient and, please, lay off the insults — definitely not cool and any such further remarks will result in comments not being approved for obvious reasons.

My apologies, I did not know that “thousands of boards have previously been shipped to Europe”, since I had not seen any, and every offer I’ve seen so far – in particular the early, cheaper models – has excluded the UK. Dhanhurley (he of the CAPITALS) seems to have shared that experience. I concede it could have been an oversight of mine; maybe I had missed the UK offers – no doubt you can confirm that. I did not realise that you have made every best effort to include your world-wide supporters in your discounted offers of the product. And I have now read your later reply (July 16, 2014,6:51am) that 16-core boards will be available in Europe later this month (July). I look forward to that and I hope you will have been able to keep prices for import to a reasonable minimum. Regrettably, I must stand by my remarks about American-centric attitudes and one-sidedness in political & business agreements having a long & bad history; you may appreciate it can raise temperatures – but I apologise if my characterisation of the perceived US attitude (particularly in regard to Limeys) was excessively robust. And I know of couse that you are not personally responsible for the actions of your compatriots, which have on many occasions definitely not been cool. I continue to wish the project and yourself the best of luck & determination to succeed.

I just could not believe my eyes when I read Bill LaChenal comments. Does he even realize that without the US we probably would not even have parallel-processor-boards like these ?
Then giving these pompous replies as if the world owes you something.

To all Americans reading this, please be aware that in Europe (including the UK) rude people like these are the exception rather than the rule. But this is a hard one, he sees only his own ‘right’ and has it not in him to show any remorse, pity the guy really.

What is his hurry ? If you had started the project 6 months later, everybody would accepted a later date for receiving boards.

I’m sure this was a hard decision, but I believe it is the right one: Adapteva needs to be profitable in order to bring 64, 1024 and larger core models to market. I also applaud the decision to separate into the three models, maintaining an entry point accessible to students.

I also hope that this will position Adapteva to move toward a second generation product based on the Zynq 7015 (which in most respects is more advanced than the 7020).

Hi Adapteva. Could you add SATA power and data connectors to connect a SSD like the Cubieboard? And would be great that it could boot up from that SSD, instead from the slow SD card. Its so sad that you improve so much the architecture just to create a bottleneck with the SD card.

SATA is not going to be added to the Parallella board, but it might be possible to make a daughter card which provides a SATA interface. Although a simpler solution would be to use something like ATA over Ethernet or iSCSI etc.

What about the video? The Raspberry Pi can play 1080p video. Is the same for the Parallella board? Is it possible to improve it to 4K video? Probably your “Desktop” cards won’t be so much until you address this.

I was wondering that too. Raspberry Pi has a powerful graphics card which is able to decode most codecs.
This is not the case for Parallella. You’re left with the two ARM cores for “traditional” software decoding,
or someone can write decoders that specifically target the Epiphany cores.

[…] Amazon US. The Microserver and Embedded versions will be available in a few weeks. You can read the announcement on the company website, where you’ll also find some interesting projects (videos) that have […]

Thanks for the clarification about the 64 core boards. I managed to find the comments about it in blog post 53; and now in the comments here. I hope I’m not overstepping my welcome by suggesting that you write a blog post about this specifically. Most people, like me, won’t read the comments all that often. There is clearly a continuing expectation that 64 core boards are on the cards. I must admit I’ve sat on the fence a bit because I’m most interested in the 64 cores. It’s true they’re not for the general public right now but with a boost from the software engineering community we might just see a whole new breed of personal computing emerge. This stuff isn’t just for the data centre – remember the Apple I; no one could even imagine what it would be useful for when it was created… I can’t wait for ultra-parallelism in the consumer space. When it comes the things we will do with our computers now will seem like the typewriter seems today: almost useless.

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am interested to buy this board. we are building our own GPS receiver for that we are realizing RF front end using MAX2769
and to realize Complete GPS Receiver with parallella board am not finding any software support. As you told Parallella Hardware and
software is opensource. if it is so please provide the Supporting information.